This disclosure provides a method and system to promote the reduction of an environmental impact by one or more users of a printing system. According to an exemplary embodiment, a printing system includes a motivational platform and an operatively associated printer driver, the motivational platform recording the historical print activity of a plurality of users associated with a group and communicating the historical print activity to the print driver which is configured to provide an active user recommended selectable printer settings for a print job, prior to being submitted, which are based on best practices within the group.
To face ongoing global warming issues and in general to promote sustainable development, a number of tools have been developed that help people to assess the impact of their behavior. These tools are often referred to as carbon dioxide calculators. They collect input, either automatically or from the user, and provide a measure of how much certain behaviors affect the environment, by translating those habits into corresponding units like carbon dioxide and energy consumption levels. Such tools are becoming widespread and their overall aim is in providing awareness and ultimately changing the user's behavior to reduce the impact on the environment.
Despite their simple mechanism, these tools are very challenging to design in such a way that they provide sufficient incentive to change the user's habits and use of resources. This is because even if there is a benefit to a cleaner environment, not many are prepared to voluntarily reduce their carbon footprint by changing their habits. This phenomenon is known as a social dilemma wherein on one hand each individual is pushed to exploit the resource to his advantage as much as possible. On the other hand, if everyone behaves in an exploitative manner the resource will be damaged to the detriment of all. The dilemma is to either take the selfish short term stake or to contribute to the longer term common good.
Social pressure can be one way to influence the individual's choice. Surveys of office workers have found that social pressure can affect the use of certain printing resources (e.g., color devices) by reducing their use to only when strictly necessary. Several conventional devices are currently available to track personal resource usage within an office environment. One product, Green Print, tracks resource usage in view of environmental concerns. GreenPrint is installed as an application on a user's computer to assist him/her to print less through suggesting several options that in one way or another reduce the total amount of printed pages. The system also provides statistics in terms of carbon dioxide, pages and “trees” about the obtained savings. This data provides rather simple measurements related to savings, which are compared only to what is available to print in view of what is ultimately sent to a printer. There is no comparison to any other standards such as a user's historical data or other users. Accordingly, it can be unclear how the behavior can be modified (e.g., both positively and negatively) to promote further action.